More often than not online shoppers search for and filter products based on rational considerations such as price, size and popularity. At times this can be pretty uninspiring!

Dr Hue is the alternative to this grey world of online retail offering an emotional splash of colour to your online shopping experience. It makes colour choice the primary filter for search and everything else follows.

Whether you’re after a gift for that friend that simply adores pink, want matching accessories for a red dress, or are searching for a sofa to compliment your striking blue carpet then Dr Hue offers a unique, fun and rewarding shopping experience.

What’s more, colour is becoming an increasingly important factor in both product design and consumer purchasing decisions. Colour is what gives a product its identity, colour is what makes a product unique, and colour is often what makes someone fall in love that product.

Dr Hue is here to quench the growing thirst for colour!

Contents:

The Idea

The Brand and Design

The Technology

The Marketing

The Exit Strategy

Well, our exit strategy is easy – just check out the ebay auction…

However, let’s say for example, while you’re there you place a (whopping) bid and win Dr Hue, the brand, website, business plan and all. And you do run it for a couple of years, growing the customer base and develop it into a well established brand – then what do you do when you want out?

Well, if the above is achieved then you will more than likely attract a host of possible suitors.

Most probably a large site such as Amazon may want to acquire Dr Hue to add to it’s portfolio of sites…

So there you have it! (Of course there are other possible exits however we have neither the time or energy to document them now.)

So, now it comes to me (Rob Mosley) to write about the marketing idea we believe should be used to launch the site and get those customers coming in and staying loyal. The idea is all about Colourful Personalities. Here goes…

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We recommend a marketing strategy focussed around identifying people who  are confident about colour, and celebrating them publicly. We look for people who are comfortable with choosing complimentary colours, people who know what colours are seasonal, which are “in” this season etc.

These ‘Colouful Personalities’  are the people who talk about colour in the context of fashion and interior design (i.e. where there are consumer products). The thinking is to concentrate on making them advocates of Dr Hue, so that the larger volume of people who are less confident with colour, the people who look to these influencers for recommendations, will discover Dr Hue through them.

As well as think about this, at the time of writing we’ve managed (somehow) to put together a small example of how this might be executed on the Dr Hue blog, which is now live. There’s even a chance for readers of this blog to get their hands on a gift! (All you have to do is blog or tweet about DrHue…)

You might win a pressie!!!

So, in this example, we’re running a simple blogger outreach campaign to generate a good few (hopefully favourable!) blog posts about our new service. In future, we could extend the campaign so people blog about the people they know who are “colourful personalities” instead.

Hopefully this illustrates how “Colourful Personalities” could work in other media too. Here’s a few ideas… the first of which we might actually be able to pull off before midday!

Twitter – if people follow @Dr_Hue, he immediately DMs them back with a link to a set of DrHue search results of products which match the predominant colour of their profile picture! Then we seed this by introducing @DrHue to people who are tweeting about colourful stuff, and asking how he can genuinely be of service (e.g. go and find them a product in a certain colour that they request and come back with the link).

PR Stunt – Random acts of colourfulness! A crack team of folk in grey macs go round giving out colourful presents… to those people who are wearing clothes that perfectly compliment the gifts they’re carrying. For example, a lady with a burgundy handbag might be given a burgundy leather belt to match! Bursts of this activity would be concentrated in fashionable areas of London, Manchester etc.

Lots more ideas have been banded about during the day, however we haven’t had the time to get them down in pixels. Apologies, we will strive to get these ideas recoreded before the auction ends!

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Here’s the techy deal. Dave and the development team are far too busy to post any details at the moment, but Dave has promised he will update this section with lots of technical lingo as soon as possible!

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Update: we have a tech doc!

Dave took his time with this because it’s important! …

Technical overview

The website is built using PHP 5 with a MySQL database. We’ve used the symfony framework for PHP which helped significantly improve the speed of development, as well as making the site easily extensible for whoever takes it on.

The most challenging part of the project was the code to analyse and pull colours out of the product images, and for this we’ve used the OpenCV library. This required us to write and compile some C to run on the server.

The front end of the site is all table-less XHTML with CSS, and where we’ve used JavaScript we’ve used the jQuery JavaScript library.

Modules

• Feed import
  The feed import takes an XML feed from an affiliate scheme and imports the data into our database and pulls in the image files onto the server. It also strips any colour text information out and tags the products against the RGB colour values. The first time a feed is imported, any product categories listed in the feed are recorded in our database, but the products themselves are not placed into any Dr Hue categories. The administrator can then use the category mapping tool (see below) to map feed categories to Dr Hue categories – this allows the products to be placed into a hierarchical structure of categories on the site.

  Development needed: 2 big areas of development will be needed to make this site sustainable. Firstly a process for updating the products imported from a feed is needed – we’ve already written the code for the import, so it’s really just writing the process of running that import automatically. Second, the site currently deals with one schema of XML feed from one affiliate : coding would be needed to import feeds from other affiliates. We can envisage building a module to allow a non-technical person to import new feeds : this would be an interface to allow them to map product attributes from new feeds to Dr Hue product attributes. This would probably take a few days to put together.

• Image colour analyser
  The image colour analyser does several things. Firstly it draws an outline around the product image, so that it can cut out the background (usually white). Then it looks at a histogram of the image, and picks out any colours that are present in large quantities in the image and tags the image against these colours. This works really well and we don’t think it needs any more work. With a lot of testing it may need some fine tuning however.
• Category mapping
  This admin module allows a non-technical person to map categories imported from a feed to Dr Hue categories by selecting a drop-down from each. It wasn’t functioning at 100% shortly before we went live, but wouldn’t take much to get there.

  Development needed: one of the biggest areas that will need work is the Dr Hue category management. This needs an admin interface to allow new categories to be added and the structure of the categories to be moved around. The category mapping tool could then be enhanced to use the tree structure (rather than listing all Dr Hue categories alphabetically in a drop-down) which would make the mapping process easier.

• Colour search
  The colour search on the front end searches for matching colours along a range of the RGB colour being searched for. E.g. if you are looking for items close to the colour R (128), G (55), B (109) then it will return products that have an R within a range of 60 of 128, a G within a range of 60 of 55, and a B within a range of 60 of 109. This works really well for some colours (e.g. blue), but not so well for other colours (e.g. grey). We’ve come up with a plan for solving this, which would involve mapping the RGB colour values to a different colour definition called CIELAB. CIELAB allows us to easily compute the distance that one colour is from another reliably across the whole spectrum and so we can return search results in order of proximity to the search colour. Once we’ve worked out the algorithm for the conversion to CIELAB this would be a really simple change to make.
• Advanced colour search picker
  We’ve used a JavaScript colour picker for the advanced colour picker which opens up as a dialog on the main category page. This works well and allows users to search for a specific colour.
• Twitter integration
  One of the last bits that we added was a neat bit of code which integrates the site with Twitter. New followers of @Dr_Hue will get DM’d with a message which includes a link to search results for the average colour of their Twitter profile pic. This is great, although for a lot of people it comes out as brown or green (if they’re supporting revolution in Iran!) and really for this to work well we’d want to tie it in with the image colour analyser module so that it could pick strong colours out of the profile picture rather than the average colour of the whole pic.

Future development

In order to make this site work in the long term, there’s no doubt it’s going to need some more development. There are areas which need to be improved so that non-technical people can run it from day-to-day, plus there are features which would be really neat to implement. Here are a few essentials:

• Feed management : the ability to add new feeds and map them to the Dr Hue products
• Category management : the ability to manage the Dr Hue categories and add intro text and SEO keywords and descriptions
• Site map : in order to get any sort of visibility on Google, a multi-page site map would be needed : we’ve got some really neat ideas for this though!

Not so essential (but still pretty important):

• Use of CIELAB rather than RGB for colour matching : vastly improve the accuracy of the search
• Improved category interface on the front end (we’ve actually built half of this already!)
• “Match colours from your photo” feature : allow users to upload a photo and then pick colours from it to match against (again, we’ve started doing this)

Nice to haves:

• Colour pallet history : a shallow bar keeping a record of the colours that you choose as you try searching for different colours : allows you to go back to a previous colour quickly
• Auto colour schemes : pick a colour and it shows you complimentary colours that could work with hit. There are a number of different algorithms for working out different complementary colours, so it could come up with a few schemes.
• Wish list : a place to put products that you fancy while you search for more so that you can come back to them

We’re sure there are loads of other features that would help make Dr Hue even better, so this last list would grow and grow…

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Here are a few of the reasons why we thought ‘Shopping by Colour’ is a good idea:

-  Firstly it seemed like a great service to use to get inspiration for gifts for someone that has a favourite colour. Say, a friend is obsessed with green, or has a bright pink bathroom, then it would be the place to shop to find the perfect coloured gift. (e.g. Shopping for Paris Hilton? Get something pink!)

- We then got thinking about matching colours. Someone may have a red dress and is looking for matching shoes, or is after some red cushions to match the roses in the wallpaper. They can search our site though a red filter.

- This also throws up complimentary colours. For example if you have a blue carpet and are looking for sofas, then you can search for those coloured sofas that will compliment the blue and fit in the room.

- Seasonal colours. You’re looking for festive colours decorations for Christmas parties? We could provide a special Christmas pallette of inspiration to choose from.

- Shopping based on mood. If you are feeling a bit low and need a pick up then maybe looking for a yellow thing to buy could be great. Could be a nice colour therapy angle!

- We also felt that injecting a bit of colour back into the online shopping experience would be good, because online shopping can often be a little uninspiring.

- We also reckon there are  strong possibilities for certain more colour-based brands and products (such as DELL laptops, Dulux or the VW Beetle) to get involved running special promotions. The Dell Candy might want to do a homepage colour takeover when they release a new gold laptop, sposored links ensue!

- I don’t care about the colour! Bit of fun – potential to click a button in the corner that turns the website black and white.

We’re sure there are lots more interesting ideas of how our service could be used… Let us know if anything springs to mind!

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Branding

The name was definitely one of the hardest things to come up with during the day. After initial brain-dumping, keyword research and frantic domain searches we soon realised that our two main keywords ‘colour’ and ’shop’ were so difficult to shoe horn in without finding pitfalls. We needed something a little ‘different’.

‘Dr Hue’ was inspired by the thought that we needed a name that made us sound like the expert in all things colour. We like the fact that it is memorable, raises a smile and adds a slice of personality to our brand which should give us great stand out in a crowded market place and back up the more personal, emotional approach to shopping.

Once we had our name sorted the brand identity soon fell into place and a character to fulfill the doctor role was researched and found. The central character would also act as a signpost for the user to start their shopping and provides scope for a host of advertising/brand executions.

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Design

Using colour as the key component to the Dr Hue’s functionality posed a number of interesting design challenges. How would people enter the site, how would they browse and how would we present results in a way that was all about colour? The first step was to make entry as simple as possible so we present the user with a simple colour palette which effectively starts of the experience. From there on in things need to relate back to that colour – so we’ve included various devices in the design to enforce the chosen colour, including the Contents of the test tube, the current colour block and Dr Hue’s ‘belt’: